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Socrates conversed and taught and died; where Demos thenes breathed deliberate valor into the despairing hearts of his countrymen; where the dramatists exhibited their matchless tragedy and comedy; where Plato charmed the 5 hearers of the Academy with the divinest teaching of Philosophy, while the Cephissus murmured by under the shadow of immemorial olive-groves, and the Hill of Mars; where St. Paul taught the wondering but respectful sages of Agora, the knowledge of the living God, and the 10 resurrection to life eternal.

There stand the ruins of the Parthenon, saluted and transfigured by the rising and the setting sun, or the unspeakable loveliness of the Grecian night; beautiful, solemn, pathetic. In that focus of an hour's easy walk, the 15 lights of ancient culture condensed their burning rays; and from this centre they have lighted all time and the whole world.

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[GEORGE GORDON BYRON, Lord Byron, was born in London, January 22, 1788, and died at Missolonghi, in Greece, April 19, 1824. In March, 1812, he pub. lished the first two cantos of his splendid poem, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," which produced an impression upon the public almost without precedent in English literature, and gained him the very highest place among the poets of the day. From that time till his death he poured forth a rapid succession of brilliant and striking productions, varying in degrees of merit, but all contributing to maintain him in his lofty literary position, and keeping his name ever fresh upon men's lips. The interest which he awakened as a poet was further enhanced by a wayward and irregular life, by an unhappy marriage, a separation from his wife, and by his finally joining the Greeks in their struggles against the Turks. Perhaps no man of letters was ever so much talked about, written about, attacked and defended, in his own life, as he.

Lord Byron's fame with posterity will not equal the prodigious popularity he enjoyed among his contemporaries. And yet his poetry has, in- an intellectual point of view, some great and enduring excellences. In description and in the expression of passion he is unrivalled. His power over the resources of the language is great, though he is not a careful or accurate writer. His poetry abounds with passages of melting tenderness and exquisite sweetness, which

take captive and bear away the susceptible heart. His wit, too, is playful and brilliant, and his sarcasm venomous and blistering. His leading characteristic is energy: he is never languid or tame; and in his highest moods, his words flash and burn like lightning from the cloud, and hurry the reader along with the breathless speed of the tempest.

Much of Lord Byron's poetry is objectionable in a moral point of view. Some of it ministers undisguisedly to the evil passions, and confounds the distinctions between right and wrong; and still more of it is false and morbid in its tone, and teaches, directly or indirectly, the mischievous and irreligious doctrine, that the unhappiness of men is just in proportion to their intellectual superiority.

There was little that was respectable or estimable in Lord Byron's life. He had no fixed principles, and was the sport of every whim or passion that assailed him. For many years, he lived an outcast from his home and country, in open defiance of the laws of God and man; not without spasms of selfreproach and half purposes of reform. His joining the Greeks showed that his profligate and self-indulgent habits had not destroyed in him the power of vigorous action and generous sacrifice.

The following extract is from "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." Thermopylæ is a narrow pass leading from Thessaly into Southern Greece, where Leonidas, and a small band of Spartan heroes, resisting an immense Persian host, were all slain. The town of Sparta, or Lacedæmon, was upon the river Eurotas. Thrasybulus was an Athenian general who overthrew the power of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens B. C. 403. He first seized the fortress of Phyle, which was about fifteen miles from Athens. The Helots were slaves to the Spartans. Colonna, or Colonni, anciently Sunium, is a promontory forming the southern extremity of Attica, where there was a temple to Minerva, who was also called Tritonia. Hymettus and Pentelicus were mountains near Athens, the former famous for honey, and the latter for marble. The modern name of Pentelicus 18 Mendeli. Athena was a name by which the Greeks called Minerva, the lit erary goddess of Athens.]

1 FAIR Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth,
And long accustomed bondage uncrcate?
Not such thy sons who whilome did await-
The hopeless warriors of a willing doom-
In bleak Thermopyla's sepulchral strait:

O! who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Eurotas' banks and call thee from the tomb ?

2 Spirit of Freedom! when on Phyle's brow

Thou sat'st with Thrasybulus and his train,
Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour that now
Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain?

Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain,
But every carle can lord iter thy land;

Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain,
Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand,
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned

3 In all, save form alone, how changed! and who

That marks the fire still sparkling in each eye,
Who but would deem their bosoms burned anew
With thy unquenched beam, lost Liberty!
And many dream withal the hour is nigh
That gives them back their fathers' heritage;
For foreign arms and aid they fondly sigh,
Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage,

Or tear their name defiled from Slavery's mournful page.

4 Hereditary bondmen! know ye not

Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought:
Will Gaul, or Muscovite, redress ye?—No!
True, they may lay your proud despoilers low;
But not for you will Freedom's altars flame.

Shades of the Helots! triumph o'er your foe! Greece! change thy lords: thy state is still the same: Thy glorious day is o'er, but not thy years of shame.

5 When riseth Lacedæmon's hardihood,

When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,
When Athens' children are with hearts endued,
When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men,
Then thou mayst be restored; but not till then.
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust; and when
Can man its shattered splendor renovate?

Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?

6 And yet, how lovely, in thine age of woe,

Land of lost gods, and godlike men, art thou!
Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow,
Proclaim thee Nature's varied favorite now.
Thy fanes, thy temples, to thy surface bow,
Commingling slowly with heroic earth;

Broke by the share of every rustic plough:
So perish monuments of mortal birth;
So perish all in turn save well-recorded worth:

7 Save where some solitary column mourns

Above its prostrate brethren of the cave; Save where Tritonia's airy shrine adorns Colonna's cliff, and gleams along the wave; Save o'er some warrior's half-forgotten grave, Where the gray stones and unmolested grass Ages, but not oblivion, feebly brave, While strangers only, not regardless pass, Lingering, like me, perchance, to gaze and sigh "Alas!"

8 Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;

Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,

And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields.
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air.
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
Still in his beams Mendeli's marbles glare:
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.

9 Where'er we tread 't is haunted, holy ground;
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould;
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,
And all the Muse's tales seem truly told,
Till the sense aches with gazing, to behold

The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon.

Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone: Age shakes Athena's tower, but spares gray Marathon.

10 Long, to the remnants of thy splendor past,

Shall pilgrims pensive, but unwearied, throng;
Long shall the voyager, with th' Ionian blast,
Hail the bright clime of battle and of song.
Long shall thine annals and immortal tongue
Fill with thy fame the youth of many a shore;
Boast of the aged! lesson of the young!
Which sages venerate and bards adore,
As Pallas and the Muse unveil their awful lore.

XC. -THE INFLUENCE OF ATHENS.

MACAULAY.

[The following extract is from a review of "Mitford's History of Greece," Juvenal was a Roman satirist. Dante was an illustrious Italian poet, born in 1265. Cervantes was a great Spanish writer, the author of "Don Quixote." Bacon was a great philosopher and writer of England. Butler was the author of "Hudibras," the wittiest poem in the English language. Erasmus was a celebrated scholar, a native of Holland. Pascal was an eminent writer and philosopher of France. Mirabeau was an eloquent French orator, who took a leading part in the early movements of the French revolution. Galileo was an illustrious philosopher and scientific discoverer, a native of Pisa in Italy. Algernon Sidney was an English statesman and patriot, who was executed upon a false charge of treason in the reign of Charles II.]

If we consider merely the subtlety of disquisition, the force of imagination, the perfect energy and elegance of expression, which characterize the great works of Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically most 5 valuable. But what shall we say when we reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect; that from hence were the

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